Silence and scholarly neglect can cause historical truth to vanish entirely

Evidence

I am reminded of a story that the famed sociologist, civil rights activist, and writer W.E.B. Du Bois related in his 1939 sociological study Black Folk Then and Now. He recounted watching a talk to the graduating class of Atlanta University in which the scholar Franz Boas regaled the students with stories of the Black kingdoms of Africa. Du Bois had by then earned a PhD from Harvard University, the first Black person to ever do so, and was teaching at historically Black Atlanta University at the time. “I was too astonished to speak,” he recalled. “All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be unconsciously distorted.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 68

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s whole theme of origin stories as infrastructure — the absence of Black history in education is itself a reframing mechanism. Also resonates with the silence/absence theme from the reader’s soundscape reading.
• SEED: The gap between what Du Bois learned at Harvard’s PhD program and what Boas casually shared suggests an essay about how graduate training in a discipline can itself encode what counts as knowledge.
• QUESTION: What exactly were the Black kingdoms of Africa that Boas described, and how did the silencing of them operate institutionally in 1930s American historiography?